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otter-clip is Otter Shell’s clipboard manager. A long-lived daemon watches the Wayland data-control protocol and keeps a bounded history of text and image entries. Press Super+V to open the launcher popup. The package also ships otter-copy and otter-paste, native utilities that talk to data-control directly. In packaged installs they shadow wl-copy and wl-paste, so existing apps and scripts route through Otter’s implementation without changes.

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Starting the Daemon

Run the daemon once per session. 
otter-clip daemon    # start monitoring clipboard selections
Add otter-clip daemon to your compositor’s autostart list so history is ready at login. Without the daemon, otter-clip list, search, and the Super+V popup have nothing to show.

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CLI Commands

CommandDescription
otter-clip popupOpen the Super+V history popup
otter-clip popup queryOpen the popup with a search term pre-filled
otter-clip listPrint all stored history entries
otter-clip search queryFilter history and print matching entries
otter-clip add some textManually append a text entry to history
otter-clip clearDelete all history entries
otter-clip pin 0Pin an entry by its index so it is not evicted
otter-clip unpin 0Remove the pin from an entry
otter-clip select 0Copy a history entry by index to the clipboard
The popup command opens otter-launcher --query "clip ...". Selecting a row calls otter-clip select INDEX to copy that item back to the clipboard. Pressing Enter in the popup is the same as running otter-clip select on the highlighted entry.

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Copying and Pasting

otter-copy and otter-paste replace wl-copy and wl-paste. They communicate with Wayland data-control directly. 
otter-copy text                          # copy a text argument
printf 'text' | otter-copy               # copy from stdin
png-tool | otter-copy --type image/png   # copy an image with an explicit MIME type
otter-paste                              # paste the current clipboard contents
otter-paste -n                           # paste without a trailing newline
wl-copy text    # resolved to otter-copy in packaged installs
wl-paste        # resolved to otter-paste in packaged installs
Point otter-copy and otter-paste at a custom history file with --file /path/to/store when you want an isolated clipboard store for scripting.

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Configuration

otter-clip reads ~/.config/otter-shell/otter-clip.conf at daemon startup. 
# Optional; empty uses $XDG_CACHE_HOME/otter-shell/otter-clip-history
history_path = ""
  • history_path: absolute path for history storage. Empty uses $XDG_CACHE_HOME/otter-shell/otter-clip-history

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Privacy and Password Managers

otter-clip skips clipboard entries that carry password manager or secret MIME hints before reading their data. Credentials copied from password managers do not end up in plain text history. Wayland data-control does not expose the source application ID for copied data, so app-ID filtering only applies when a source ID is available to the caller.

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Image Support

otter-clip accepts text offers and common image MIME types from the clipboard. Images are stored as bounded blob files with MIME type and path metadata, not decoded and re-encoded. The otter-launcher popup can show image thumbnails inline when you open clipboard history with Super+V.